In this election year, the discourse among the Republican candidates and their party's leadership often involves accusations of infidelity to conservative principles. Regrettably, those cherished principles, though apparently self-evident to conservatives, remain unenumerated for the rest of us. Here is an attempt to fill this information gap by listing the conservative principles I have observed in recent decades:

• Cheap labor above all
• The evil of labor unions
• Disfranchisement of opposing voters
• Regressive taxation
• Weak and unenforced tax laws
• Christian hegemony
• Public funding of religious education
• Wealth = virtue
• Lax consumer protections
• Personification of corporations
• Firearms ubiquity
• Offshore banking
• Expensive health care for mediocre results
• Money = free speech
• Negligent environmental stewardship
• Privatization of everything (except maybe the armed forces)
• Corporate welfare
• Xenophobia
• Misogynistic policies on contraception, abortion and wage equality
• Commerce informing science
• Diminished social safety nets
• Voodoo economics
• Upward redistribution of wealth